Linux tips and tricks for faster and easier administration Linux servers and applications! Troubleshooting and solutions!

Friday, 28 February 2014

PowerPath vs Multipath - which one to use

Hm....
It all depend. They are doing the same thing but why use powerpath and not multipath or why use multipath and not powerpath?

In case that you don't know what they are, they are managing redundant paths from Linux OS to storage. It means that you have multiple paths to same LUN on storage and these software are responsible for that.

From functionality point I personally think that PowerPath has more options to manipulate with paths and LUN's. Of course this is my opinion and it's not objective one. From my working experience, I had much less trouble using PowerPath than multipath. By using I think of scanning paths, adding new LUNs, removing LUNs, displaying options, etc.
Probably someone will disagree with me.

From vendor point of view PowerPath is EMC property and if you want support for it you have to licence it. You can downloaded it, installed it, use it, but if something happens and you need support, you will have to pay licence for it.
On other hand multipath is part of Linux and support for it comes with support for your distro. So from financial point of view, if you are already paying for support for your Linux distro (RH, SLES) there is no need to buy PowerPath when you already have all functionality in multipath.

So if budget is not issue, then I would buy PowerPath but... that licence money could be redirected is some other licence for some product that is not already implemented in Linux OS or some new project.